Podcast 19: How to Sell Holistic Services with Integrity

business ethical business finding clients mindset podcast selling Jun 25, 2020

Selling isn’t something that comes naturally to most practitioners. Many feel it’s manipulative and sleazy and shy away from any selling.

True, there are some people out there who shout and are pushy without even considering if you’re interested.

Selling doesn’t have to be pushy, but you do have to make sales to survive. It’s necessary if you want to earn enough money to pay your bills. If not, you’ll be forced to find other sources of income to subsidise yourself or stop practising altogether.

Ultimately, selling is just about helping people solve problems by making them offers. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. You make offers to people based on how you can help them. By making offers, you’ll start to train your clients to understand the value of your services and products.

Fortunately, there are ways of selling that are filled with integrity. There are different ways of making offers based on mutual respect for your clients and for your services – you just need to find the right style for you.

Understand who you help and how you help them

You need to know who your clients are and how you can help them achieve the results they want. Having an identified niche and a clear marketing message will pay dividends in helping you make offers to people. Here are two articles to help you with this:

This will help you focus on who you make offers to, in order to help the right people, get the best results.

Helpful marketing

The need for selling is reduced by creating helpful marketing. This is a perfect strategy for practitioners as it fits brilliantly with the ethos of wanting to help people. Helpful marketing is about creating lots of value and building relationships. It limits the need for sales as clients are prompted to approach you instead.

Helpful marketing will help you build sustainability for your business. By building these relationships, your potential clients will already have a connection with you. They will trust that when you do make them an offer, it’s based on what is best for them.

This worked brilliantly for my practitioner colleague Claire and I. We created a series of podcasts where we shared tips and helpful information available for people researching what we offered. When they were ready to pick a practitioner, they already felt that they knew us and we were then their first choice.

Making offers

Whilst consistently helping people with free sessions, creating content and answering endless email enquiries is honourable, you must make offers. You must tell people about how you can help them. If not, you’ll build a community of people who are consuming all your free information without even realising you have a solution for sale.

Making offers is often the missing piece in the puzzle to build a thriving practice, and it’s a critical one.

There will be times when you make offers and people say “no” – that’s okay. It may not be the right time or the solution they’re looking for. These are the times you need to put down to experience, brush yourself down and move on. With every no, you’re one step closer to a yes. The more you practice making offers, the easier it’ll be and the more success you will achieve.

Keep it simple, you’re simply saying, if you want to resolve your issue, I have this solution available.

Follow-up enquiries

Practitioners often focus their marketing efforts on attracting new clients. They forget about those who’ve already enquired and shown interest in their services.

If you’re getting interest in what you do but it is not converting into paying clients, your problem isn’t your marketing. Spending more time and money on marketing won’t work if you’re not following up on the interest you’ve already generated.

Here’s an article on following up enquiries and creating a system

Follow-up of some sort, regardless of how simple, is better than waiting for clients to remember to call you again!

Tell clients the next step

Make sure clients understand the process of how to work with you and the steps they need to take. The clearer you can make the system, and the easier it is for them to navigate, the more clients you’ll get.

Something as simple as an online diary for taking bookings removes barriers. I resisted this for far too long believing my diary was far too complicated, and I needed to manage it. How wrong was I! Having an online scheduling system has saved me time on the endless emails trying to book appointments, and I get more discovery calls booked than ever before.

It’s worth asking a friend to review the process of booking to work with you. It’ll give you an external opinion to ensure your process is simple and easy to navigate.

If you want to learn how to review your client journey, check this article out.

Ultimately you have to make sales to have a business. You can do this in a way that feels ethical and also provides your clients with your solutions.

If you want help in creating a sales and marketing strategy for your business that feels ethical, book a discovery call with me today.